Many people believe the computing world is made up to only two rival factions; Apple with the Macintosh, and Windows + Intel (thus Wintel) with the IBM compatible PC. A few others are astute enough to add Unix/Linux workstations to the list, but few know the real rundown. Here then, is a quick overview of the major computing systems in use throughout the world today (or yesterday), including my opinions concerning the strengths and weaknesses of each. I have kept this as impartial as possible, and have based it upon actual knowledge, not just upon my own particular likes and dislikes. Some of my opinions will probably surprise you.

• Amiga
  • Once dominant, the Amiga lost out on total dominance due to poor marketing on the part of Commodore combined with increased "lemming" mentality of purchasers moving to PCs with DOS/Windows. Of all the home/office computer systems, the Amiga was/is by far the most advanced in many ways. First, since 1986, it has been a true multitasker. An Amiga made in 1986 with a lowly 68000 processor multitasks as well as any Mac or Wintel box made 10 years later. Also, Amigas are extremely fast because they have a large number of co-processors to handle video, audio, and disk-related tasks. The entire Multimedia revolution began on the Amiga. Apple would like you to believe it began with the Mac, but this is not the case. The Amiga was always, and remains, more popular overseas and in Canada, than it was here in the states. Because computer systems cost considerably more (when compared to income) in many other countries, consumers did more comparison shopping than did consumers in the USA. Consequently, the Amiga and Atari computer systems were vastly more popular outside the USA, because they offered substantially more "bang for the buck". Contrary to what you may believe, Amigas are still in use today, and are still useful because they are so advanced in the first place. Imagine a computer you could buy in 1986 for less than $1000, that could do true multitasking, near-photographic color, and full-screen full-speed color animations with digital stereo sound; that's the Amiga. An advertisement I saw several years ago in a British Amiga magazine read "If you absolutely have to have a new computer today, the next best thing to your Amiga might be a Macintosh". That really made me laugh! The Amiga can also run Macintosh and PC software (with limitations) via emulators and cards. Last I heard, you can still get some new Amiga systems, which are being manufactured in Europe. Personally, I've never actually owned an Amiga; Someone out there want to give one? Please?
• Atari
  • Another wonderful computer system was/is Atari's ST, TT, and Falcon series. Also based upon Motorola chips, the ST had one major advantage over the Amiga; a really nice monochrome display. Also, the Atari is blazingly fast in many ways (1 to 1 interleave DMA hard-drives in a HOME computer in 1986 anyone? anyone?), due to co-processors similar to the Amiga's. I owned both a Mega-4 ST and a Falcon, and they were wonderful computers. At the time, the Amiga simply didn't have a good enough monochrome display for my purposes (desktop publishing), and the Atari had a great Macintosh emulator. That's right, the Atari could run Mac software way back in 1987 or so with devices known as "Magic Sack" and "Spectre", which I used. What's more, they ran the Mac OS considerably faster than a real Mac did. The Atari OS (GEM/TOS) however, was not originally designed to multitask. When multitasking was finally added it was great, second only to the Amiga, and vastly superior to that of a Macintosh or Wintel machine. Here is an example of what I mean by blazingly fast: On the Falcon, which runs on a 16mhz 68030 chip (same as the Mac IIcx), there is an animation editing/creation program called Apex Media. Now, in this program, you are able to run the animation you are working on in full-screen size in true-color at up to 30 frames per second while zooming in or out on the animation and panning to follow it. That is simply amazing. Sure, it is possible to do this on a modern Mac or PC, but you're using a CPU a hundred times more powerful. Again, Atari lost out mostly because of marketing and a failure of the buying public to THINK.
• Be
  • I really hoped this computer platform would take off. In many ways, this was everything best about a Unix workstation, an Amiga, an Atari, and a Mac all rolled into one. It multitasked as well as the Amiga, was as fast as the Atari, as stable and powerful as the Unix workstation, and almost as easy to use as a Macintosh. Also, there was almost nothing in the BeOS that resembles Windows, and that can only be good. The BeOS originally ran on PowerPC chips in a computer called the "BeBox". Later, you could get a version that would run on your Mac, and later still on Intel machines. Unfortunately, Be made some serious errors. First, they killed the BeBox itself. This was bad news because the BeBox was just fantastic. They started to lose people's interest about this time. It was the release of the BeOS on Intel and the discontinuation of the product on Apple hardware that really killed entheusium. They moved from a platform for wild computer entheusiests (BeBox) to a platform for people disenchanted with the Wintel status-quo (Apple), to a platform where the only thing that really matters is conformity (Wintel). They didn't stand a chance competing against Windows on Intel hardware, but they were too shortsighted to realize this. I predicted their demise the day they quit producing the BeBox, but I retained hope until they moved to INTEL I was at the Macintosh Expo in Boston they day they "first publically demonstrated" the BeOS on INTEL. Throngs of interested, fascinated people turned away and never returned. It was a sad day for all the BeOS supporters at the show; we could feel death in the air.
• Macintosh
  • You must be thinking; "this guy is a Mac consultant, but he repeatedly puts the Mac down". Well, I do love the Mac, but unlike many, I'm not blind to its faults. Sure, just a few years ago Amiga, Atari, and Be computers all had tons of groovy "techno-geek" advantages over a Mac (or PC), and I still admire them for that. But, unless you are really "on the fringe", you will probably purchase either a Mac, or a PC. Additionally, the Macintosh has five key major advantages over any other computer system; 1) Seamless software integration, 2) Ease of hardware integration, 3) Ease of troubleshooting, and 4) Overall ease of use (only the Newton is easier). 5) Overall design quality (both software and hardware). The combination of these simple things means that you can often get vastly more work done on a Macintosh than you can on another platform, because there is less learning time and less downtime. When you install something, generally, it just works, and that is *really* cool. Macintosh computers running the MacOS (there are many others that run on the same hardware) are also extremely fast in terms of raw processing speed. Mac multitasking and stability are nothing less than fantastic, and superior to Windows, period. A lot of PC owners don't have a clue about Macs, because they have never bothered to comparison shop. That's a shame. Hey, at least they knew enough to go line up at midnight when Windows 95 was finally released, so they could make their PCs run more like a Mac. They'll do the same thing when Microsoft tries (and fails) to catch up to Mac OS X, but 5 or 6 years too late. In short, the Mac is a wonderful computer to use; everything just "feels" right, like a finely tuned luxury sports sedan, and everything works pretty much as it is intended to. That's rare and valuable in the computer world, and it is why the Mac has such a loyal following.
• Newton
  • The easiest to use, most intuitive computer ever made is Apple's Newton. OK, we have to admit that until the Newton 120 with Newton OS 2.0 they were pretty bad. Hey, they were a radical new technology, and often that takes time to mature. The Newton is the only computer intuitive enough that you can forget that you are using a computer at all. Of course, being this innovative and cool, Apple has decided to kill it. Well, hopefully they follow through and roll some of the Newton technologies into new MacOS based palmtop devices. Don't make any mistake, the Newton is not a PDA, despite being called such by many people who don't know better. The Newton is a full-featured computer, and the 2k series is super fast. You can do just about anything on a Newton that you can do an a full desktop computer, including browse the internet.
• Unix and flavors
  • What can be said? These boxes are responsible for powering much of the internet itself. Most ultra-high-end software runs on this platform (which has many variants). You can get Linux or (some variant of) BSD for your Mac, PC, Amiga, Atari, and BeBox. Cool huh? I've played with several "flavors" or Linux, and I have to agree with the majority opinion, that it just isn't ready for use by the normal human. Also, now that Apple adopted Unix (via a contorted route), you can just buy a Mac OS X machine and have the best of all worlds: A Unix box that runs mainstream comercial software.
• Wintel
  • Windows on Intel = Wintel. We make that distinction, because there are many other operating systems that run on Intel hardware, just as there are many operating systems that run on Mac hardware. We also make this distinction because Windows is the worst operating system ever created, and we don't want to offend people who use Intel hardware to run NextStep, OS/2, Linux, or the BeOS, which are all much better. Here is what is right about Intel hardware; 1) Cheap. Yes, the hardware to run Windows on is cheap. Note I didn't say that it is a good value, it is just cheap. You get what you pay for. In the long run, Mac hardware costs a lot less, and surprising as it may seem, a Wintel box today will often cost just as much as a Mac (or even more) once configured with similar options. But, you can buy a brand new $399 piece-of-junk Wintel box, and you'll never get a new Mac that cheap. Here is what is wrong with Intel hardware and Windows. 1) Windows is terrible to use. You won't know this if you've ever used anything else, but if you have, then you know what I mean. Windows just sucks. It is the Yugo of computer operating systems - nothing good can be said about it. What do I mean? Well, everything in Windows "feels" like it is just thrown together. Buttons don't react nicely, the mouse somehow doesn't seem to move smoothly, menus are difficult to find and use because they are in the windows instead of being at the top of the screen, and so on. Windows gained market dominance solely through marketing, the destressing "lemming" mentality on the part of the buying public, and the false belief that you "have to use Windows" because "everyone else does." 2) Intel hardware has some limitations as well. The major problem is limited IRQs. These IRQs are required by most every piece of hardware in the PC (video card, hard-drive controller, parallel port, etc.). When you run out of IRQs, you run out of expandability. It is very common today to find PCs with 5 or 6 open PCI slots, and 1 available IRQ. Guess how many of those slots you get to really use? To make matters worse, most products will only use specific IRQs (like maybe 5 or 7). This makes IRQ juggling a necessary skill for almost any PC owner. In theory it is possible to share an IRQ between multiple devices, so long as those devices are never in use at the same time. In real life, I've seen this work about once... I don't know why PC owners stand for this kind of crap, if Apple produced a computer such a serious flaw, their purchasers would a) raise hell, and b) return them to the store and buy something else. With the Mac, if you have six slots, you can put in six cards, no problem. Luckily for PC users, newer interfaces like USB (Universal Serial Bus) and Firewire help solve some of these problems by allowing many devices on a single interface (thus using only one IRQ). Apple introduced a similar technology in the Mac Plus sometime around 1985 called ADB (USB is much faster, but otherwise a similar concept). That's right, once again, the Intel hardware ran least 12 years behind. Finally, Windows is just the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of computer evolution. Almost every single feature in Windows has been available on one of the other platforms for literally years. There are lots of examples, but I'll use just one basic one; Windows users got multiple-monitor support with Windows 98, while the Mac has been able to use multiple monitors since about 1986. Call me silly, but I don't want to be a dozen years behind in computing just because "all my neighbors" are.
• Others
  • There are many other computer systems that I haven't mentioned, mostly because I don't know much about them. One that I should mention is the Acorn, an apparently nifty computer system once popular in England. That's all I know about it. The moral of this story; there is far more to the computing world than just Mac and PC. Buy what you want, not what somebody else thinks you should want.